Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en we talked about the background is we talked about chess.com last episode i tweeted about it because i was even more people loved that tweet dude that tweet had tons of engagement um it was good and the the summary of this is that i actually we underestimated it so chess.com gets around 200 million monthly uniques they have 60 million registered users they uh traffic has grown significantly if i had a guest they do at least 100 million in recurring revenue subscription revenue uh potentially is worth a billion dollars super fascinating company um go ahead what were you gonna say we were trying to hype it and we actually were under hyping even even though we were trying to hype it um and by the way the guy who started he’s like a ex stanford guy or the guy who owns it uh you know it’s two i think stanford guys uh which is cool like you know they didn’t go the same track probably as 95 of their classmates and they’re going to outperform 99 of them just by by doing something really simple that the world wanted so i started thinking about this because we talked about it you brought it up cool topic cool bit really cool business it really fits the what we call the new zealand type of business that andrew wilkinson kind of coined that that phrase which is it’s this independent thing it has like a cult following it’s profitable it’s simple it’s not nobody competes with it it’s like new zealand nobody’s going to war with with chess.com uh you know the biggest competitor i think it’s called lie chess or something like that it’s basically like an open source free you know like kind of like alternative and it’s also doing extremely well and those are like the two uh but it seems like people kind of prefer chess.com so i started thinking okay what’s the nextchest.com what are the others is there a whole slew of these guys because i think that’s where we didn’t talk about last time that we should have and so i wanted to double click in a little bit so i started and that was that’s a really really hard question i’ve been thinking about it too i only came up with like dominoes i looked into solitaire websites they a lot of them crush uh but yeah that’s a hard question to ask so i spent 10 15 minutes on it but that was enough to tell me something very interesting so the first one that came to mind was because here’s the characteristics that you need you need a game played by tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people that is not owned by a brand chess forks checkers also works but the problem with checkers is it’s so simple that it’s not as like uh there’s not as much depth to it therefore not as much of a like kind of like uh money made and passion around the sport uh sudoku was the second one that came to mind so i went to sudoku.com and sudoku.com it’s just like chess.com it’s like you you go to snoke.com and there’s already a sudoku board waiting for you with clock going and it’s like oh play here it is you don’t need to download you don’t need to sign up you don’t need to do anything just play sudoku i love that then they you scroll down a little bit and you see like this advertisement for like a mobile app a mobile soku app so i click that i’m like i bet this app i bet this is an amazing distribution for this app app crushes so this company called easy brand behind it so the sudoku app that they have has 50 million downloads the uh on just google play forget about iphone that’s just google that’s just android um probably 100 million total lifetime downloads the website itself gets you know 10 to 20 million visitors a month uh so they’re getting free tr like basically free traffic to their mobile apps where they’re able to monetize and easy brain basically makes they’re like a mobile app developer that makes these apps they’ve had over 750 million downloads lifetime of these little simple number game apps starting with sudoku then like a remix of sudoku then like another number game if you like that one and they just cross promote them within each other i bet this company is crushing it they’re based in europe and that’s like i have information on on them i just found some interesting stuff when i googled them and went to the website there was something amazing about them that immediately stuck out and and just this quick google it i’m wrong but it is based in cyprus any time a company is based in cyprus it it’s like it’s turns out these guys actually are uh from like the belarus they’re actually from this area but they’re based in cyprus so i just googled it real quick so uh did you know that it was they were acquired um three months ago no i did not know this so that’s okay that’s not the piece i have their revenues i have their profit and i have the uh all their user numbers and i have can i guess i’m going to be totally wrong but i i like to guess by the way a little tip always guess before you hear any number that’s how you get good at knowing numbers because you guess and then when you’re wrong your brain remembers that [ __ ] and you you start to hone that gut instinct okay so here’s here’s my guess okay well uh how much were they what what’s their revenue i’m gonna guess that their revenue was 400 million dollars a year okay what’s their um profit 90 million dollars a year pretty good um all right how much were they required for i’m gonna guess that they’re required for 852 million dollars okay and how many um how many daily active users do they have across their 15 games i’m gonna say they have 25 million dau okay so i didn’t do you didn’t do horrible okay so easy brain was acquired uh last this most recent february uh they were uh acquired for 640 million dollars in stock and up to 120 million dollars of additional consideration if they hit it so 640 yeah what is that that isn’t that exactly 850 no what’s six uh what 640 plus 100 is plus 25 is five seven eight so great job you guessed 8.50 great job you’re almost there um they their revenue is uh in 2020 revenues were 210 million dollars okay so you were off there by half you guessed 400 million but their profit was 70 million you guessed 90. right pretty good um they’ve had 750 installs over the course of their the lifetime of all their other things all their games they have uh 15 live games with 12 million daily active users you guessed 25 million okay not bad not bad um what a company so okay so that was the first one i thought of and by the way i think that there’s other versions of that like you know i don’t know go look at like you know sudokuonline.com i don’t know what’s that like you know all the things people are going to google search if you can get the top level domain for those that’s really interesting um so then i started looking at some others poker.com so i went to poker.com and poker.com is kind of like this crappy like just describe what you’re looking at when you go to it let me look at this but you can’t this is an actual poker right you’re not betting it’s not even a as you can’t play there it’s just like reviews here’s it’s like an affiliate site so it’s like oh here’s a place to play poker here’s where you can go because they get big kickbacks for basically sending a player to pokerstars or wherever if they deposit and so this is horrible website um crappy kind of like affiliate and reviews site dude you could do so much more with this website like if somebody was like dude i’m gonna i have a if you have a mobile poker app that’s like good i would pay like ungodly amounts of money for poker.com i think that that’s a and they also if you like do their traffic search see what they get it’s nothing so they should be getting a lot more traffic having poker.com um okay so then there’s some other ones crossword puzzle.com crossword.com the go to this like they don’t even like crossroads.com or something it doesn’t even like render it’s like a there’s like fun asterisks on the screen yeah like what’s going on here because crossword is the other game that’s like sudoku it’s like chess that people played religiously and they love we talked about how how much the new york times makes off their mini crossword game the number was uh 90 million dollars in subscription revenue from crossword puzzles for the new york times so so i am surprised that crossword puzzle across the puzzles.com crossword.com i can’t believe that these sites are not being like leveraged so i was very surprised to see this and follow-up uh yeah so you go to crosswoodpuzzle.com it says please email suggestions to dkw99999 yahoo.com right so i emailed the guy so so so you see this the website is basically like a white page with a bunch of text and it’s basically just the very bottom things the very bottom it says this dome no this domain is not for sale please do not inquire about purchasing it all emails from anonymous are unknown companies asking me a price will be ignored sorry last updated july 2007 right so i emailed this guy i was like hey uh saw your website um like i think it’s awesome that you’re not trying to sell this but i’m curious like why aren’t you trying to sell this and uh what’s your you know what do you want this to be why do you believe like why do you believe that it should be done this way i you know i’m just super curious like what’s your thought process so we’ll see if he replies i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back